Crypto Citizens

Bitpats is a revolutionary group devoted to keeping people hidden from view, and this novel is the second installment in their story. It opens in a world that shifted rapidly from scattered villages into one interconnected network controlled by a small number of powerful interests, and no one anticipated where that change would lead.

In an age where information is gathered on an enormous scale, institutions and corporations can locate people and estimate their next moves, from the products they will buy to the causes they might back. Even staying silent can be read as a message. The old chance to reinvent oneself and begin again has disappeared, because a person's digital trail lasts forever and no passing of years erases it.

Tricia Campbell sees a way to fight back by turning surveillance tools against the people who built them. Alongside Joshua Raintree, a financial analyst, and Kenny Lu, a gifted technologist, she guides clients through the tangle of online identities and biometric records designed to close every gap. Together they develop what they call crypto citizens: people who use the very systems built for tracking to slip through the seams that remain in the global data web, finding routes and places where they can conceal who they are while still moving freely through a closely monitored society. Boone leads the Bitpats, who join this effort because they believe that the harder it becomes to vanish, the more vital it is to try.

The book is a war novel whose conflicts are political, economic, technological and philosophical all at once. It asks whether a government or agency has the right to keep citizens under constant watch. Its story includes intense passions, both loving and destructive, and it examines how technology, applied carelessly, ignores the morals of whoever wields it. At its heart is the struggle to remain human in a world that is growing less so.